Dept. of Bad Timing

Via Calderone, it seems Esquire has a new profile of Fox's Shepard Smith. In it, the anchor offers a common defense of Fox's objectivity:

"There has to be news at a place called Fox News," he says, and he's not the only one. It's the mantra of the network, the fallback equation that — until the recent entrance of Glenn Beck, anyway — has enabled its employees to distinguish between the programming that takes place between nine in the morning and eight at night, which is called News, and the programming that takes over thereafter, which is called Opinion. "I think we do a pretty good job of labeling it for the viewer," Shep says.

Again: that's the Standard Fox Line. O'Reilly and Hannity may be ideologues, but during the day, Fox is straight news. Fair and balanced.

That has always been an absurd claim, of course. But today, it's particularly funny. See, on today's edition of Fox's Happening Now, one of those supposedly unbiased daytime news programs, Fox tried to pass off a Republican press release as its own reporting. As Media Mattersdemonstrated, the Fox "reporting" copied the GOP press release word for word -- right down to a typo.

So, what was that you were saying, Shep?

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